Kathleen Jacobson, The Couture Closet, designed a modern, luxury closet with a double-sided island, enclosed upper cabinets, mirrored doors, and more. The project won the Closet: Wood Over 18 linear ft. in the 2023 Top Shelf Design Awards. Winners were announced on April 13 at a reception sponsored by CCF Industries during the Closets Conference & Expo, held in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Here's how Jacobson describes the project:

Project Title: Modern Luxury Closet

Project Details: The Michigan homeowners moved into this newly built spec home in Dallas and contacted us to modify the existing closet. The builder designed the wardrobe boxes at a height the homeowner could not reach.  We started the project by removing the fixed shelf in each wardrobe box when we discovered extensive black mold behind the cabinets on an exterior wall. Since an entire wall of cabinets had to be removed, the homeowners gutted the space and let us design a closet that fit her wardrobe needs, height, and vision of her dream closet.  

Projection Construction: We designed a custom 4-inch style and rail for the face frame of her cabinets. An inset shaker style drawer and door front was the perfect complement to the woodwork. Our cabinet team used premium quality paint-grade maple plywood for all the boxes and Baltic birch inside the drawers. We built the cabinets to 10 feet six inches high and decided to bring down the ceiling to meet the cabinets. Lighting is a key element in all our closet designs and fabrication. We used Hafele Loox5 LED tape with a 45-degree angled channel to distribute the lighting back into the 25" deep wardrobe boxes. All our boxes are lit vertically, concealing the channels behind the styles. A double-sided island provides 20 drawers with finished panels on the ends. The top drawers are outfitted with stealth locks for security. A beautiful marble was selected for the countertop. We added a handbag unit with another bank of drawers for her accessories, glass inset doors, and glass shelves above to display her purse collection. We originally designed only a handful of boxes to be behind glass inset doors. But after living in the space for a few weeks, the homeowner asked us to enclose all the boxes to keep dust away. We enclosed all the upper cabinets behind glass inset doors. We mirrored all the doors on the back wall to glam up the closet. We added heavy-duty chrome wardrobe rods, recessed pull-out valet rods, and polished nickel hardware. A fun wallpaper on the ceiling added glamour to this modern luxury closet.

Materials Used: All wardrobe boxes were built with paint-grade maple plywood; Marble on Island; Baltic birch inside the drawers; Grass under-mount soft-closing full extension glides; Blum full overlay soft-close hinges; Hafele Loox5 LED tape lighting and WAC 45-degree channels; Colonial Bronze recessed style pull-out valet rods; Benjamin Moore Advance Paint; Schaub Polished Nickel Hardware pulls and Starphire glass & mirrors

Equipment Used: CAD Drawings were used for the conceptual design work for our clients. J & J Construction & Cabinetry field-measured and laser-leveled all walls & floors to begin fabrication.